‘Communities can rebuild the country’

Rorrye Byrge wanted one pair of the free earrings offered to the first 100 guests of Oak Ridge’s new Kroger Marketplace during its grand opening Sunday.

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By Russel Langley/The Oak Ridger

Oakridger - Oak Ridge, TN

By Russel Langley/The Oak Ridger

Posted Jul. 1, 2014 at 5:28 PM

By Russel Langley/The Oak Ridger
Posted Jul. 1, 2014 at 5:28 PM

Rorrye Byrge wanted one pair of the free earrings offered to the first 100 guests of Oak Ridge’s new Kroger Marketplace during its grand opening Sunday.

So the Oak Ridge resident lined up at 4 a.m. for the 8 a.m. grand opening and it seemed that her diligence paid off — she was the first in line.

“The only other person here when I got here was the security guard,” Byrge said. “So I kept him company.”

Daniel Gonzalez of Oak Ridge was also an early riser Sunday. He arrived at Kroger Marketplace at 4:20 a.m. and the group behind him, got there at 5 a.m. That put those folks at the head of a line that stretched the entire length of the Kroger Marketplace parking lot by 8 a.m. and continued to grow until about 8:30 a.m. By 9 a.m., when the ribbon-cutting ceremony began, all the people standing in line were inside the store and doing their best to help Kroger break the company’s record for single day sales.

As the ceremony for the ribbon-cutting began, Store Manager Marty Irwin served as the master of ceremonies and helped coordinate and introduce the assembled guests and officials. U.S. Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, state Rep. John Ragan, Mayor Tom Beehan, City Council members Charlie Hensley and Anne Garcia Garland, County Mayor Terry Frank, and County Commissioners Steve Mead, Myron Iwanski, Harry “Whitey” Hitchcock, and Robin Biloski were among the elected officials gathered for the event. Former University of Tennessee football coach Phil Fulmer joined in the ceremony before signing autographs inside the store.

The guest of honor, though, was legendary Manhattan Project photographer, Ed Westcott. The shopping center that the Kroger store now anchors is called the Westcott Center in his honor. Irwin presented Westcott with a plaque to mark the occasion and Westcott’s son spoke for the beaming photographer.

Beehan said that the opening of Kroger “made a statement about this market and our city.” The mayor said that 57 individual pieces of property — many of them residential — had to be combined into one to make the store happen and that it was a remarkable feat of work.

According to Beehan, the city has not had a project “this big in a long time.” He said the story about Kroger needed to be told.

“It’s a story that needs to be told about how communities can rebuild the country,” Beehan said.

Later that afternoon, Oliver Springs native Janelle Arthur entertained the crowd in front of Fred Meyer Jewelers with her own brand of country music. Arthur made it to the final five on the TV show “American Idol” and has performed at Dollywood and The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. About 100 shoppers crowded into a little corner of the store to hear her sing.

Page 2 of 3 - The beginning

After the festivities, The Oak Ridger sat down with Paul Xhajanka, real estate manager for Kroger and the man behind pulling the project together. He said the Kroger company had been trying to put a new store in Oak Ridge for the past eight years — but nothing was working.

“Expansion was not an option because of our neighbors in the old location,” Xhajanka said referring to Kroger’s old store that closed Saturday night.

During a five-year planning meeting for the Kroger Co. in February 2012, he said, it was discussed that a new store was needed in Oak Ridge and that was when he presented his proposal. He called it a risk that was millions of dollars higher than what the company usually accepted when building a new store.

After that, he began working with Tommy Saul and Rhodes Seger of Blanchard and Calhoun real estate company in Georgia. Together, Saul and Seger, began approaching property owners in the Grove Center neighborhood in Oak Ridge. In order to make his plan work, Xhajanka said, they needed 57 properties and no less.

“We needed 57, not 56,” he said.

As Saul and Seger spoke to home and property owners they began getting properties “under option,” meaning people committed to selling their homes. As reported in The Oak Ridger at the time, there was one hold out who eventually agreed to sell to the company. The property owners really worked to better the city and made a sacrifice, Xhajanka said, even though Kroger paid them what he described as fair prices for their homes.

“Some of these homes had been deeded from parents to children and been in families a long time,” he said.

The Oak Ridge Universalist Unitarian Church was placed under option in August 2012 and it was time to approach city officials. Xhajanka, Saul, and Seger went to the city in September 2012 and told them they needed a decision from the city by Oct. 23, 2012 because they had contracts with property owners that were set to expire. Xhajanka presented two proposals to the city: one for a center with the church still in place and one for a center with the church moved. The contract with the church allowed the second option to go forward and the city approved the project.

Many commercial projects in Oak Ridge have been given payment in lieu of tax (PILOT) options to help the projects move forward, but not so for Kroger. Xhajanka said that he never even asked the city for such an option. He said he understood how a PILOT option can help some projects move forward, but the Kroger project did not need it.

With the approval by city officials, Xhajanka and his team moved forward and closed on the final property sale on Nov. 15, 2012. They received the checks for the property owners on Nov. 17, 2012, which was a Saturday and by the following Thursday, they had distributed all the checks to the property owners. They then began the process of clearing the lots to make way for the new center.

Page 3 of 3 - Xhajanka said that even though they were in somewhat of a hurry, they worked with home owners to give them the time they needed to move. Some homeowners decided to take their homes to new properties, as was the case of one working single mother. She decided to move her then paid for home to a new piece of land and raise her children.

“That probably helped her a lot,” Xhajanka said.

Those homes that could be moved were, while some were leveled to make way for the center. Perhaps one of the most poignant stories in the venture was the memorial garden at the church. Xhajanka said that about 114 people’s ashes were enshrined in that garden.

“Every family agreed to move their relatives ashes so that we could have the property,” he said.

When all of the buying and title work was done, Kroger had spent $14 million to buy all the homes and the church. The once quiet, older neighborhood has given birth to a shopping center that can now bring new life to the areas around the center and the city as a whole. Xhajanka said that all 16,000 square feet of “small shop” space has been leased to five to six tenants. He would not go into details about those tenants. He expects that the “out parcels” will be leased within the next 12 to 18 months.

Xhajanka said that he has been in the commercial real estate business for 23 years and has done about 500 projects. He knew of only a few projects of this scale involving multi-parcels combined to make one commercial center.

Xhajanka said that he wanted to thank Saul and Seger for their tireless efforts. The two men approached property owners to buy their homes and could not tell them why for “various reasons.” He also wanted to thank Jim Normand and David Flitcroft of the Joyce, Meredith, Flitcroft, and Normand law firm of Oak Ridge for their efforts in clearing the various title issues that arose during the transactions. He also thanked all those who sold property to make the deal come to fruition. He stressed how many things came together to make the project work.

“It would have only taken one person to so ‘no’ to stop the project,” he said. “We needed 57 properties, not 56.”